The Wine Ran Out at Our Table

It is not an argument. She would almost prefer an argument.

Everybody is polite. That is the exact word and she has used it to herself about forty times in the last year. Polite. They say thank you. They ask how her day was and they listen to the answer for the correct length of time. Nobody slams anything.

And nobody stays in the room.

Dinner takes about nineteen minutes now. She timed it once, which she is not proud of. And afterward everybody goes somewhere: upstairs, out, to a screen, to a thing that needs doing, and the room she is in becomes a room she is in on her own, most evenings, at about a quarter to eight.

She is forty three.

She cannot name the year it started. She has tried. There was no event. Nothing happened that anybody could point at, and that is the part that has kept her awake, because a thing without a cause is a thing without a fix.

Here is what she has landed on, and it is why she has not asked anybody about it. She thinks she used it up.

There were years, and they were good years, when this was a full loud house. She ran it. She was the one who made the evenings happen and she was good at it and everybody would tell you so.

And her working theory, sitting in a half cleared dining room at ten past eight, is that a house has a certain amount in it and hers has been drunk.

There is a wedding in John where the wine runs out about a third of the way through, and everybody who tells that story starts at the miracle and skips the sentence at the end.

They have no wine

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally hands over a duty. Make an effort. Institute a family night. Get everybody round the table and insist. I am not going to do that. A woman who has run a house for twenty years does not need to be told to try, and a mandatory evening is not the same thing as a full room, and everybody at that table would know the difference within four minutes.

At Cana the wine runs out. Not at the end, which would be normal; in the middle, which is a disaster, and it is somebody's wedding.

Mary says four words to Jesus: They have no wine (John 2:3).

That is the whole of the intercession. Not a plan, not a request, not a suggestion about what should be done. A statement of the situation, said to Him, and then she stops.

You are permitted to say the situation and stop there. That is not me making the passage smaller than it is; John 2:3 records four words and no strategy, and the Holy Spirit who preserved that exchange did not include a proposal from anybody in the room.

And then the part everybody skips, which is the governor of the feast, who does not know where the wine came from, tasting it and saying: Thou hast kept the good wine until now (John 2:10).

Until now. The best of that day arrived after the running out, and it arrived in a house where the running out had already happened and had already been noticed and had already been embarrassing.

Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.John 2:10

The theory about the house

Now the thing she has been carrying, because it is not true and it is very nearly reasonable.

A house has a certain amount in it and hers has been drunk. That is an economics of family life and nobody taught it to her; she built it herself, sitting alone in that room at a quarter to eight, out of a genuine observation about a quiet house.

And it will not survive John 2. The wine at that wedding ran out and the good wine came afterward, out of water, in stone jars that were sitting in the same house the whole time, and nobody in the room had any idea it was happening.

You have never been running down a finite supply. John 2:10 has the best arriving after the failure and not before it; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is not drawing on a reserve that a woman spent in her thirties.

This is yours right now, at a half cleared table: a house where the running out is not the last event. John 2:10 says kept until now, and kept is a word about deliberate holding back; the Spirit who preserved that line put the good wine after the shortage on purpose.

And if the table is one person

Let me say this plainly, because this subject usually assumes a full house and it should not.

If you are reading this and there is nobody upstairs, none of it shrinks. The quiet in a house of one is not a lesser version of the quiet in a house of five, and the sentence about having used it up gets said in both.

Cana was a wedding, which is the fullest room in the ancient world, and the shortage in it was still a shortage. The passage is not about how many people are there. It is about a supply that arrived after everybody had already concluded there was none.

You were not measured by the number of chairs that are occupied. Psalm 68:6 says God sets the solitary in families, and the setting is His action and it does not require a full table to begin with; the Holy Spirit who inspired that line put families and solitary together in one sentence.

Fruit is not output, and a nineteen minute dinner is where the difference shows. Output is the evening: countable, timeable, and currently short. Fruit is what grows in a house where somebody is still cooking and still there at a quarter to eight, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, in a full room or an empty one.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. While the dishwasher does what it does anyway, tell Him one true thing about the quiet with nothing asked for and no plan attached. Not a request that they come down. One true thing. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody times that.